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Shuteye for the Timebroker: Stories
 
 
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Shuteye for the Timebroker: Stories [Paperback]

Paul Di Filippo (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)


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Book Description

April 6, 2006
Shuteye for the Timebroker gathers a wide, wild assortment of stories that collectively represent critically acclaimed author Paul Di Filippo's extensive concerns, themes and styles. Pure science fiction in the "Galaxy" mode can be found in the title piece, while modern-day publishing practices get a raking-over in the satirical "The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet" (included in The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-Second Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois).

Humorous fantasies such as "Captain Jill" and "Billy Budd" segue into a Dunsanyian tale such as "Walking the Great Road." There's a touch of horror to be found in "Underground," "Eel Pie Stall," and "We're All In This Alone" (the latter co-written with award-winner Michael Bishop). A politically-charged story of a fantastic assassin occurs in "Shadowboxer." Finally, the nearly three dozen vignettes under the title "The Farthest Schorr" form a mini-collection in themselves, as they take flight from the surreal paintings of Todd Schorr.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The 15 stories in Di Filippo's latest collection (after 2005's The Emperor of Gondwanaland) show his command of a colorful palette of ideas and approaches. The title tale is an amusing satire of a sleepless 24/7 near-future in which time is traded like a commodity by professional (if sometimes incompetent) brokers. In the screwball fantasy "The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet," a male writer hires an actress to play the pseudonymous female "author" of his bestselling chick lit novel—then finds himself getting absorbed like one of his feckless male characters into her far too authentic performance. The book also features respectful homages to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Jules Verne. Most of the stories percolate with the author's trademark gushes of wit and humor, but several of the best are deadly earnest, including "Underground," a spooker set in the New York City subway system, and "Shadowboxer," a tale of a psychic assassin fighting "the war on terror" that brilliantly captures the moral ambiguity of attitudes in post-9/11 America. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Most of Di Filippo's previous collections have been thematic. The stories in Strange Trades (2001) explored unusual professions, while those in The Steampunk Trilogy (1995) lampooned Victorian science. This time Di Filippo displays his versatility, with quirky contemporary fantasy sitting beside cutting-edge hard sf. Two early stories, "Captain Jill" and "Billy Budd," are set in the mythical New England town of Blackwood Beach, whose citizenry includes a centuries-old wizard and a green-tinted gardener who grew from a mandrake seedling. The title story explores a future when drugs have vanquished sleep, and the extra time available to businesses is handled by "timebrokers." Other tales span the spectrum of genres from horror (a New York subway rider encounters the ghost of a teenage suicide) to the avant-garde, best exemplified in the final story, "The Furthest Schorr," which consists of 32 mind-bending vignettes inspired by the paintings of surrealist artist Todd Schorr. As in all of Di Filippo's work, superior craftsmanship shines from every page. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press (April 6, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1560258179
  • ISBN-13: 978-1560258179
  • Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.5 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,578,880 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

 

Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Shuteye for the Reader, March 26, 2009
This review is from: Shuteye for the Timebroker: Stories (Paperback)
Paul di Filippo has some unique and offbeat ideas, but most of the short stories in this collection fail to take hold with the reader. In most of these tales, witty dialogue and surreal plot twists merely become momentarily impressive writing shenanigans, leading to vague and obtuse resolutions that will probably leave the reader unsatisfied. Granted, there are a few strong stories in the collection, with a touch of weird romantic whimsy in "Billy Budd," postmodern celebreality in "The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet," and an especially effective look at the morals of the war on terror in "Shadowboxer." But these are among the few stories in this collection with themes robust enough to truly connect with the reader.

Other tales are built on disappointingly thin premises, like a cheesy rockstars-with-superpowers conceit in "Slowhand and Little Sister," and inconclusive tributes to Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, several of the stories here are vanity exercises for unknown themed anthologies and tributes, and without similarly-themed stories by others, they suffer in isolation here. The ultimate vanity project in this collection is "The Farthest Schorr," a collection of 32 disconnected mini-tales of about one page each, inspired by the paintings of fantasy artist Todd Schorr. This exercise wouldn't have worked much better if you could actually see the paintings in this book, which you can't. di Filippo admits that many of the stories here are inspired by the works of his predecessors, and that's a fine way to find interesting story ideas, but his level of inspiration is only partially passed on to the reader. [~doomsdayer520~]
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Dream-like Science Fiction and Fantasy, October 8, 2006
By 
David B Richman (Mesilla Park, NM USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Shuteye for the Timebroker: Stories (Paperback)
Paul Di Filippo is certainly a talented fantasy and SF writer. His short stories in "Shuteye for the Timebroker" are gems of the trade and remind me of the days a friend used to send me copies of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction." In fact one of the stories was published in this old standard.

From the lusty "Captain Jill" to the surrealistic "The Farthest Schorr" (the latter commemorated by the painting on the cover) Di Filippo has fashioned a brilliant collection of hard core SF-fantasy that is difficult to put down, If you have ever thought about the possibility of being awake 24 hours a day, or what would have happened if Jules Verne's Captain Nemo were real and his inventions had been applied to solving the world's problems in Iowa, or what it might be like to really go aboriginal, this is your book.

Good reading on a trip, each story will reward the reader with odd and unexpected twists. If you like stories like those presented by Rod Serling on the Twilight Zone, you will love this collection!
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
Someone was singing in the cellar. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
secret sutras, mind putty
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Captain Jill, Blackwood Beach, Lincoln Island, Cindy Rose, Sally Strumpet, Great Road, The Squawk Box, Squawk of the Week, Squawk Jock, United States, Plum Sun, Chick Morrow, Cyrus Smith, Yam Mot, Ethan Dedicos, Welcome Goodnight, Ernie Salter, Francis Bacon, Lieutenant Texas Hold'em, Sylvester Jowell, Father Fahey, Freddie Cordovan, Granny Little, Harvard Morgaine, Riley Small
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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